Red Hat® Linux® 7 Unleashed

Chapter 27. Configuring and Building Kernels

In This Chapter

• Introduction to the Linux Kernel

• Understanding the Kernel

• Understanding the Kernel Sources Structure

• Obtaining the Kernel Sources

• Configuring the Linux Kernel

• Building and Installing the Kernel

• Recovering from Faulty Kernels

The scope of this chapter is forward-looking. Since prebuilt images for the current Red Hat kernels are readily available, and because those ready-made kernels require little more than an rpm -Uvh command, your main use of this chapter may be to build the "canonical" Linux kernel from the sources maintained by Linus Torvalds. With Linux in a transition to new release, this chapter will focus on the canonical 2.4 kernel. Because Linux 2.4 is almost twice the size and has ...